Developers will break ground next month on a publicly subsidized hotel near the Oregon Convention Center, finally fulfilling a plan discussed on and off for nearly three decades.

Representatives for Mortenson Construction said work on the 600-room Hyatt Regency in Northeast Portland would begin with a groundbreaking ceremony on July 14. The hotel, on a site just north of the convention center, is expected to open in 2019.

The $224 million hotel will be built, in part, with $60 million in revenue bonds backed by lodging taxes paid by hotel guests in the city. Officials say the Hyatt Regency alone will generate enough lodging tax revenue to repay the debt.

The project also will receive $10 million in state lottery funds and $4 million from the Metro regional government, which operates the convention center.

The project is the latest in a long line of efforts to build a hotel near the convention center. Officials were planning for a hotel as far back as 1990, when the convention center first opened.

The proposal was delayed by a series of legal challenges from rival hoteliers led by financier Gordon Sondland's Provenance Hotels. The hotel group
eventually settled
the lawsuits in exchange for a Metro-owned parking lot near the site valued at $1.9 million.

The new hotel would serve the convention center by reserving a block of 500 rooms for groups holding events there. Officials have said the subsidy was necessary to secure the room block, and to support construction of a hotel next to the convention center.

The project is moving forward in a vastly different business environment than the one in which it began.

More than a dozen hotels are under construction or newly opened in Portland, most of them on the west side of the Willamette River. The peer-to-peer model for vacation lodgings, typified by the tech company Airbnb, has also boomed in the intervening years.